EVENTS

A Field Whose Time Has Come And Gone

These fucken dumshittes still injecting agonist/antagonist shitte into fucken rat brains are fucken morons. There’s a reason that no fucken decent neuroscience journal will publish any of that fucken garbage: because it’s completely uninterpretable and is a field that should go away now that we have much more refined genetic and other methods to address the same questions.

Local injection of agonists or antagonists can still be an excellent first pass at investigating questions directed at the function of an area or structure in the brain. Yeah, if you want to dissect a circuit, then use more specific viral tools. But when trying to get a handle on the role of a structure in the animal’s behavior, cruder lesion methods are definitely still appropriate.

CPP – your ignorance is embarrassing. Fancy-pants genetic methods are costly and can be equally confusing and uninterpretable, if not more so, than a classic pharmacological approach. Scientific inquiries should not be restricted to a certain approach. If the classic approach serves to address the question, then why not?

CPP, you have a giant sticke up your asse. While local microinjection-type studies certainly can’t, by themselves, tell you how a circuit works, they provide important information. Together with other info from electrophysiology, imaging, and your fancy-pants newer genetic techniques, microinjection experiments have often contributed a *lot* to what we know about how the brain makes behavior.

I’d be interested in knowing what specific study led you to post your little diatribe.